Sneakytoes:They had a massive rail project more than 650 years ago? o_O

Well, to be honest it wasn't a massive railroadproject, it was a massive railproject. There's just a bit lost in the translation here. You see, back then you had big issues with transporting goods. Now another thousand years or so before this you had the Roman roads but by the time of the plague a lot of that infrastructure has been re-purposed into building hovels and fences. The rail project was supposed to provide a transportation system in which things could be suspended from a series of rails and then towed along easily by a donkey or Welshman. Sadly, when a third of the population perished the need to ship goods about the country became secondary in importance and the project faded into the mists of history.

Kansas City had a huge flood 1950 that wiped out some of the country's major stockyards. Flash forward to about 1970 when excavation was beginning for bridge pillars on the new I-635. They found where all the cattle had been buried. They say the engineers were unhappy.

Seriously. If I were a cartoonist, I'd create a superhero or villain named the Dangling Participle The mayhem he would cause! Breath-taking!

There is just the inkling of a possibility that people may have died in large numbers laying rails before the invention of the steam-engine--they used carts on rails in mines before Watt studied under Joseph Black, the inventor of carbon dioxide (well, discoverer--he called it "fixed air" because it would not burn).

These rail ways varied, but the basic distance between the rails was based on Roman carts and chariots (they made medieval carts in much of Europe so they would fit in the ruts made on Roman roads by centuries of traffic). The carts were first pushed by the miners and then by "pit ponies", tiny horses that lived in the mines in their own subterranean stables. Some of the bigger mines (especially salt mines) had their own chapels, etc., carved out of the stone or salt. In places like Cappadocea, entire cities were created underground to protect the population against invaders.

50,000 buried in one cemetary seems rather high. Yes, Paris did lose half its population, or 50,000, to the Black Death in a matter of months, but it seems unlikely that all of the dead in London were buried in the same place and I expect it was smaller than Paris at the time. Could be. I know in later plagues, the dead were buried in pits. This is not the first time that excavations have found Plague pits. And the Plague is not the only disease operating on a large scale--several diseases often combined their efforts to destroy large populations: cholera, influenza, the Plague (which comes in several sub-types such as pneumonic plague and the classic skin disease with buboes).

But I suspect that the true number is lower and that the 13 bodies buried are from another plague or an early stage of the proposed plague, because at the peak of the great plagues they just dumped bodies in mass graves because they didn't have personnel to lay them out in individual graves. There were hundreds or thousands of people dying each day of the plague during the Great Plague of London (which followed the Great Fire of London, and preceded the Great Property Boom of London).

The first outbreak of the plague in 1347 was the worst because people had no immunity and because the Norwegian rats which halted the invasion of the plague-bearing species did not play a role at that time.

Doctors knew nothing of how the plague was spread (many assumed it was air-borne or blamed cats and dogs because they died also). Even attempts to kill the rats and other animal victims of the plague wasn't a lot of help because the fleas would abandon the rats and bite the rat-catchers, whether cats, dogs or humans. The plague eventually fell to urban hygeine and the Norwegian rat. Scientists still debate whether the identified infectious agent (a protozoan) is really the culprit. In all likelihood, there were two or more agents involved in some of the great plagues because some of the symptoms don't quite match those of the plague in either its skin or lung infection forms.

Plagues often follow other disasters such as earthquakes, wars, fires, famines, etc., because the rats come out to play when their natural habitat is destroyed or damaged. Rats normally avoid humans and you might not see one where there are many. I have only seen two or three rats crossing streets in the last thirty years. They don't do it often when humans are around.

brantgoose:50,000 buried in one cemetary seems rather high. Yes, Paris did lose half its population, or 50,000, to the Black Death in a matter of months, but it seems unlikely that all of the dead in London were buried in the same place and I expect it was smaller than Paris at the time. Could be. I know in later plagues, the dead were buried in pits. This is not the first time that excavations have found Plague pits. And the Plague is not the only disease operating on a large scale--several diseases often combined their efforts to destroy large populations: cholera, influenza, the Plague (which comes in several sub-types such as pneumonic plague and the classic skin disease with buboes).

But I suspect that the true number is lower and that the 13 bodies buried are from another plague or an early stage of the proposed plague, because at the peak of the great plagues they just dumped bodies in mass graves because they didn't have personnel to lay them out in individual graves. There were hundreds or thousands of people dying each day of the plague during the Great Plague of London (which followed the Great Fire of London, and preceded the Great Property Boom of London).

The first outbreak of the plague in 1347 was the worst because people had no immunity and because the Norwegian rats which halted the invasion of the plague-bearing species did not play a role at that time.

Doctors knew nothing of how the plague was spread (many assumed it was air-borne or blamed cats and dogs because they died also). Even attempts to kill the rats and other animal victims of the plague wasn't a lot of help because the fleas would abandon the rats and bite the rat-catchers, whether cats, dogs or humans. The plague eventually fell to urban hygeine and the Norwegian rat. Scientists still debate whether the identified infectious agent (a protozoan) is really the culprit. In all likelihood, there were two or more agents involved in some of the great plagues because some of the symptoms don't quite match those of the plague in either its skin or lung infection forms.

Plagues often follow other disasters such as earthquakes, wars, fires, famines, etc., because the rats come out to play when their natural habitat is destroyed or damaged. Rats normally avoid humans and you might not see one where there are many. I have only seen two or three rats crossing streets in the last thirty years. They don't do it often when humans are around.

I think it was in Barcelona that I saw my first mass plague burial ground./a lot of bodies in a very small area with so many more burned on the same grounds// have seen more